


Trusting him

by MissMollyBloom



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective, Established Relationship, F/M, Molly is in on the plan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:01:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23133601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissMollyBloom/pseuds/MissMollyBloom
Summary: My story for Sherlolly Appreciation Week 2020 - Day 7, your favourite headcanon.I love the idea of Molly being in on the plan from The Lying Detective. This was going to be the start of a fic, but having re-read it, I think it stands alone as is. I hope you enjoyRated M for some naughty words.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Comments: 1
Kudos: 51





	Trusting him

Her fingers fumbled as she undid the buttons of his shirt. She was trembling, terrified.

The engine of the seconded ambulance roared to life. Molly dropped her stethoscope.

“Fuck.”

He picked it up for her, fingers brushing, eyes warm through the haze of narcotics. He was in there, she knew it.

“It’s going to be ok, Molly, trust me”.

She laughed.

He looked like shit – so much worse than she’d expected, or what he’d led her to expect weeks ago when he’d let her in on his plan.

One week after Mary’s death, mere moments after Rosie had been picked up from Molly’s house by the sunken, empty ghost of John Watson. John, with eyes red from tears that didn’t stop and from nights without sleep. John, whose face had lost all its rounded edges and whose cheeks looked dangerously hollow from days and days without food.

Molly wasn’t entirely comfortable leaving Rosie in his care, but how could she deny a grieving husband the comfort and company of his child, the last link to his lost wife?

John left, and if Molly’s faith hadn’t been stripped away by her own traumatic loss – the swift and sudden deterioration of her father from pancreatic cancer – she would have sent her prayers with him. Instead, her words echoed around her mind, bumping into the ache in her heart at the loss of her friend Mary.

The knock on Molly’s door came mere moments later, so swiftly that he must have been watching from across the road – as close as he could safely get to John Watson at present.

She opened the door, greeted by a silent stare and a fear she’d never seen Sherlock show. The scene from mere days ago played in the air between them. “Anyone but you,” she’d said, and it broke her heart to say it. But now, playing across the detective’s face was a silent question – would she blame him, too?

“John just left, but you know that already, don’t you?”

He bowed his head. A nod. A supplication.

She moved sideways, granting him entry. She refused to allow herself to inhale as he passed, denying herself the pleasure of his familiar scent of aftershave, coffee and cigarettes. He removed his jacket, headed into the kitchen and sat at the bench, as he had done countless times at all times of the day and night, nodding the slightest assent when she offered him a cup of tea.

She wondered when he had last eaten.

As the water warmed, Molly filled the silence between them as she used to back when they first met and his mere presence intimidated her, his piercing blue-green eyes reading her every secret, reducing her to a jabbering shadow of her usually confident self. Days long gone now – before desperate declarations of trust in Bart’s basement, one faked death, two years of lying to their closest friends, three sharp slaps on his drug-addled face.

But today, her backsliding wasn’t caused by any intimidation – his form was too sunken, his face too sullen to intimidate anyone, let alone her. Instead, it was comfort that caused her to reenact their old routines, a reminder of simpler times, back when Molly was a side-character in the adventures of the world’s one and only Consulting Detective.

Before Molly Hooper became Sherlock Holmes’ secret lover.

“Rosie has been sleeping well,” she said as she opened the cupboard to grab Earl Grey he’d brought back from a case in India, mere months ago. It might as well have been years.

Met with silence, Molly continued.

“She’s taken to playing with an old Cabbage Patch doll of mine, and I didn’t have the heart to make her leave it behind,” she said while she unrolled the pyramid-shaped teabags, placing them into the cups. For most, bagged tea would seem sacrilege, but it was their routine, and Molly expected he needed more of the familiar.

“Lynda,” Molly said, still referring to the doll.

Molly was cut off by the boiling of the kettle.

“I named her after the character in Press Gang.” Molly explained, only to realise the detail would be lost on a man who would have deleted anything unnecessary – and kids’ tv of the late 1980s would almost certainly fit that category.

Molly stopped speaking as she poured the water. She placed his cup in front of him, picking hers up, warming her fingers as the heat seeped through the ceramic.

His tea remained untouched.

The bench separated them.

Molly filled the silence. “Sorry, it was a TV show I used to watch after school, it was about teenagers who were journalists and-“

Sherlock spoke.

“I think I have to die.”

Molly lost grip on the cup in her hand. It exploded into a dozen pieces as it landed on the floorboards.

“Fuck!” She swore at his words as well as the mess. It was all a mess.

Molly bent to clean it, sharp ceramic threatening to pierce the skin of her scalpel-calloused fingers. She only noticed he had joined her when his large hand reached out to cover her usually steady fingers which were now shaking uncontrollably.

She had known death as an occupation, they both had. But only in Mary had death crossed the line from work to family, coming as it had for their dear friend.

The thought of Sherlock inviting death back, and so casually, made Molly’s eyes sting with hot tears – rage, fear and grief.

She stood stepping back away from him. She needed to think.

“What the fuck, Sherlock?”

“I’m not actually going to die,” he explained, “but I have to make it seem like I might. Like I could. It’s the only way.”

“The only way to what?”

“To save John Watson.”

And so he showed her Mary’s message.

And then they made a plan.

And then she calculated the precise dosages.

And he learned all he could about Culverton Smith.

And now it was time for her to play her part.

“Do you trust me, Molly?” back in the ambulance, he asked again as she rebuttoned his shirt. Examination over. He was still alive, although barely.

The ambulance rolled to a halt, they only had minutes left together.

She placed a hand over his, moving both to his heart.

“I trust this,” she said, and meant it. If the world knew Sherlock Holmes for his remarkable brain, only Molly Hooper knew him for his heart. His love for her, for John, for Mary.

A love that would see him go to hell and back for his friend.

As she watched Sherlock and John walk into the lion’s den with Culverton Smith, Molly wished again that she could pray. But she couldn’t.

She could only trust him.


End file.
